Eric Eng > Recent Status Updates

Anyway, I thought the traveler pretty much deserved what he got and that you should never play games.

He had shown off his money. During the night his mother and his sister had beaten him to death with a hammer in order to rob him and had thrown his body in the river. The next morning the wife had come to the hotel and, without knowing it, gave away the traveler’s identity. The mother hanged herself. The sister threw herself down a well. On the one hand it wasn’t very likely. On the other it was perfectly natural

A man had left a Czech village to seek his fortune. Twenty five years later, and now rich, he had returned with a wife and child. His mother running a hotel with his sister in the village where he’d been born. In order to surprise them, he had left his wife and child at another hotel and gone to see his mother, who didn’t recognize him when he walked in. As a joke he’d had the idea of taking a room.

I was almost surprised that I had ever enjoyed anything other than those rare moments when the judge would lead me to the door of his office, slap me on the shoulder, and say to me cordially, “That’s all for today, Monsieur Antichrist.” I would then be handed back over to the police.

I do not forget any good deed done to me, and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.

For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
So let us be alert in a twofold sense:
Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.
And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.

Happiness cannot be perused; it must ensue.

Pleasure is, and must remain, a side effect of by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.

Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!

…no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.

Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.

…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

The fact that we had neither nicotine nor caffeine also contributed to the state of apathy and irritability.

A man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.

The salvation of man is through love and in love. 37
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not his is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance. 38

Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one’s own life and that of the other fellow.

Delusion of reprieve. The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.

“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” Nietzsche

We are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond.

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. (307)
She was just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years. (315)

Hack away you mean red “fella”, he said, and the old man raised the axe and split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple.